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The Current Transcript for February 22, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

SOUNDCLIP

The bad guy with a long beard manning the check point at the corner, will always be somehow lesser evil than the coward plane who drops bombs, destroying houses.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: He's talking about the on-going and confounding allure of ISIS among some Syrian civilians caught amidst the civil war that seems to know no end, and he speaks with an authority no one would envy. Nicolas Henin is a French journalist held captive and brutalized for ten long months by ISIS, alongside Americans James Foley and Steven Sotloff, both of whom were beheaded. Nicholas Henin gained an inside strategic understanding of the war that has him insisting that ISIS and Assad need each other. Hear him in half an hour. Also today more political maneuvering…

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Why is the Prime Minister playing footsie with Putin?

[cheers and applause]

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AMT: The Conservative opposition is furious with the Trudeau government's intent to reengage with Russia. Critics say it is futile and naïve, others insist that Canada’s silent treatment has not worked and needs to change. We've got that debate in an hour. But we begin with the fighting in another Middle Eastern country…

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[gunfire and yelling]

AMT: …and concerns that Canadian made weaponry sold to Saudi Arabia may have fallen into the hands of rebel fighters in Yemen. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti…this is The Current.

Canadian weapons may have fallen into hands of Yemen rebels

Guest: Nahlah Ayed

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[gunfire and shouting]

Well the civil war in the small Mid-East country of Yemen is already the cause of a humanitarian catastrophe. It is a bewilderingly complex conflict that has drawn in the militaries of virtually every state in the region. And now, it seems, it has drawn in Canada as well. Canadian-made rifles have shown up in the hands of the Houthi rebels as they take on the pro-government forces there. Experts believe the rifles, among them an LRT-3 sniper rifle, are made by a Winnipeg-based company, PGW Defence Technologies. And they were first spotted in photos and videos emerging from that area. The most likely explanation is that they were exported legally to Saudi Arabia… And their appearance in Yemen raises new concerns about Canadian arms companies doing business with the kingdom. The CBC's Nahlah Ayed joins us from London England to tell us more. Hi Nahlah.

NAHLAH AYED: Hello.

AMT: How did these images first surface?

NAHLAH AYED: Well they were posted on several accounts on Twitter and other places and also appeared in local Yemeni reports back in June. We got a tip, last fall, that they existed and that an international intelligence consultancy was investigating them. So they had concluded that the weapons are Canadian once we decided to follow-up.

AMT: And how did you go about verifying whether the rifles were from Canada?

NAHLAH AYED: We first listened to what this organization had to say about the weapons and then we went about trying to confirm it. So, we consulted with a large number of weapons experts both international and Canadian, some who are independent who are paid for what they do, others who work for Amnesty International. It took a while but they too confirmed that what they saw in that one main photo was an LRT-3, as you mentioned, sniper rifle that is made in Winnipeg. Now we did speak to Nic Jenzen-Jones who's the director of the organization Armament Research Services. They track arms in combat zones and he explains how they link this weapon in the picture to the Winnipeg-based PGW Defence Technologies.

SOUNDCLIP

You start with, ideally markings. Now we don't have access to those from the quality of the images so we can't be 100 percent certain. Ideally you want to have the manufacturer's name marked on the weapon and you make a pretty strong case from that. However, for some weapons in particular the LRT-3, they’re so distinct visually that there aren't too many other rifles that look like them. In this case the chassis of the rifle was manufactured by another Canadian company. And they do they do have different custom rifles that are built on that chassis, so that could be one of another number of the rifles, but there are other distinctive features: the barrel, the bolt, etcetera, that we examine closely, and even the complete package to see how it's put together, the colours it's finished in and so on, the suppressor that was provided, those things point towards a particular manufacturer and a particular rifle. Now I would say in this case we're almost certain. You know on the balance of probability it's almost certainly this sort of weapon, but we like to keep that one percent margin of error just in case.

AMT: So Nic Jenzen-Jones is 99 percent certain the rifles in Houthi rebel hands are from Canada. Remind us Nahlah, of the stakes in this conflict.

NAHLAH AYED: Well for one Anna Maria, Canada, in fact all countries are banned by a UN embargo from selling weapons to the Houthi sides, so that's one problem. The other is that Canadian weapons could be pressed into service in a war that has killed 3,000 civilians and displaced hundreds of thousands and has put, what is an already poor country on the verge of famine. So Canadian weapons are potentially being used in a conflict that Canada didn't sign up for and that illustrates the danger of exporting to a region that is increasingly volatile.

AMT: Were you able to reach someone in Yemen to ask about the weapons?

NAHLAH AYED: We did make several attempts and we did get ahold of one local journalist who does have links to Houthis. He's in Sana’a, he sent me the tweets that he sent out at the time, in June, about this. He talked about the battle, he was familiar with the battle that happened at the border that probably caused this diversion, and through sources he was able to determine the man's name who was holding the gun, where he's from, the region that he's working in and…

AMT: And who is this Nahlah?

NAHLAH AYED: His name is Hussein al-Bukhaiti, he's in Sana’a.

AMT: Let's listen to what he told you.

SOUNDCLIP

The first one, I got the pictures from a Houthi source, and they always bring us pictures from the battlefield inside, south of the Saudi border, and he knows that guy personally and he even told me his name is Shamsan, he refused give me the full name. But he is from Sana’a, and he is with Ansala Houthi, and he is still inside the Saudi borders, somewhere in the south region of Gizan province, 100 percent sure. That source, we always get pictures from inside the Saudi border, I mean his job job is to document everything that's happening inside the Saudi border, and as he told me, this guy is a friend of mine, and he told me, this is a friend of him in Sana’a, and they’re both from Sana’a.

AMT: Were you able to find out about how the rifles would have got to the Yemeni rebels?

NAHLAH AYED: The original reports locally and the tweets were saying or suggesting that they were actually captured in battle with Saudi forces inside Saudi territories on or around June eleventh, and also that this may not have been the only time that this has happened with Canadian weapons. I did ask Nic Jenzen-Jones of Armament Research Services and here's what he thinks happened…

SOUNDCLIP

I think there are a couple of different paths the weapon could have followed, but for us the most likely is that was captured from Saudi army forces, Saudi land forces and probably sees alongside some of the rifles we saw in that same imagery some G-36 type of rifles as well.

NAHLAH AYED: So the implication there is that these weapons would have been exported legally to Saudi, and that they were lost in battle on the ground to Houthi forces.

AMT: What were you able to find out about the weapons that PGW, the Winnipeg-based company sells to Saudi Arabia?

NAHLAH AYED: Well they are very high…what PGW sells in general are very high-end rifles. They are also used by the Canadian Forces. And what we do know is that, and have verified is that Saudi troops who patrol the border with Yemen, appear to be using PGW weapons, because we have pictures actually taken on an international media tour last year that actually shows soldiers carrying what our experts say is likely, another rifle called a PGW Timberwolf. It's a different type of sniper rifle, so this is a strong indication that they do buy these rifles from PGW, but it's just one of the few things that we have to go on.

AMT: What does PGW Defence Technologies say about the allegations that their rifles are being used in Yemen?

NAHLAH AYED: Well PGW would not confirm that it even exports those rifles to Saudi. It is actually rare in my dealings with, on this type of story to come across organizations in Canada that will talk about what they sell to specific clients abroad. You know it's a same problem we had with that 15 billion dollar deal signed under the last government, you know details are scarce and the government does not provide details in statistics. Now on the PGW website though, the company does list the Royal Saudi Land Forces as a client. Now the owner, who I wrote to said that they don't do media about clients as I mention, but he did say, he did confirm that everything they do is exported under the guidelines that Canada provides, and that it is all legal. He wrote me saying please be aware that all our exports are undertaken via the authority of export permits, which are issued by the government of Canada.

AMT: PGW is not the only Canadian company selling arms to Saudi Arabia is it?

NAHLAH AYED: No, it's not. Saudi is in fact one of the top importers of Canadian small arms and according to a CBC analysis that we did, in fact over the last ten years, there's been about 28 million dollars worth of small arms sold to Saudi by Canadian organizations. Now, a spokeswoman for the Department of Global Affairs says Canada has some of the strongest export controls in the world, that it closely watches or monitors those kinds of exports to countries that are a threat to Canada, that might be involved in war hostilities, that are under UN embargo or that have a persistent record of human rights violations of its own people.

AMT: Saudi Arabia has a dismal human rights record. What are the concerns around selling it weapons?

NAHLAH AYED: Well the issue that rights groups most often cite, of course is as you mentioned, the country's human rights record and the concern that those weapons could be used against their own citizens in a situation where they might rise up against the country's leadership. Now, it is also a country that seems more willing, recently, in recent months in fact to flex its military muscle. It is playing as we mentioned a major role in Yemen. Its airstrikes have been criticised by rights groups and by a UN panel as being indiscriminate, as targeting civilians, it apparently destroyed a Medecins Sana Frontieres hospital last year. The other concern is that Saudi may not be living to its side of the bargain when it buys Canadian weapons, and that is to ensure that they are used for the purpose and by the end user that they said it would be. So you know it's losing them in battle, it could also be we don't know, but it does drop weapons to allies on the ground, only in the some occasions to have been picked up by the wrong people by Houthi forces and by others. We don't know if Canadian weapons are among those air drops but this raises the question of what if? Now Amnesty International has called on the Canadian government to suspend exports until those kinds of risks subside. I spoke to a Ken Epps who's a former Policy Advisor for Project Ploughshares. Here's what concerns him…

SOUNDCLIP

The major concern of course is that Saudi Arabia, the government of Saudi Arabia does regularly violate human rights of their own citizens. Groups like Amnesty International Human Rights Watch rank Saudi Arabia as one of the worst human rights offenders on a regular basis, so that issue does remain a very dominant one, and one that I think Canadians should be concerned about if we are supplying the government with equipment.

NAHLAH AYED: Now Anna Maria, Ken Epps sees further risks that Canadian weapons exported to the region might be diverted even further than Yemen.

SOUNDCLIP

It's very much an open secret, if you like, now that the Saudi’s regularly supply rebels in Syria. There is kind of acknowledged activity on the part of the Saudi government to supply Sunni opposition forces in or in a number of areas and throughout the Middle East. And there's every expectation that would be happening in Yemen as well. Quite apart from the situation of Saudi equipment going into Yemen and then being captured or being used, you know, after the equipment is moved over the border.

AMT: Okay, so what he's saying is alarming. You've made the point that Saudi Arabia has sold about 28 million dollars in small arms from Canada.

NAHLAH AYED: It is a very big business and of course, the UK and the US also sell weapons to Saudi, they sell the bulk of those weapons. But, Saudi is Canada's second biggest weapons customer after the US as mentioned and just in small arms alone as you said it's 28 million dollars in the in the last ten years. We spoke to James Lynch about this. He's the Acting Deputy Director for Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International.

SOUNDCLIP

I mean for many Western governments, selling weapons to the Gulf States was very convenient, because they would place large orders and there was a feeling that they wouldn't be used. You know, these were important things from a prestige point, but actually wouldn’t be used in conflict or repression. That picture has changed and we’ve seen now multiple examples of these weapons being used in active conflicts or internally in ways that are extremely damaging to human life. What we've also seen in the past few years is a number of Western governments effectively putting their foreign services, their diplomatic services, at the service of commercial relationships, of commercial promotion. And arms is obviously one of the most lucrative forms of commercial promotion.

AMT: Interesting. Nahlah, does Canada do any tracking of these weapons once they arrive in Saudi Arabia to make sure they are not used in ways that contravene international law?

NAHLAH AYED: Well when we have put those kinds of questions to the government it says that, what it does actually, it requires the receiving government to ensure that the weapons are used in a way that they were intended. In a statement that we got from the office of the Minister of International Trade we heard this…that certificates issued by the receiving government must include a quote confirmation that the receiving government accepts responsibility to ensure that the items proposed for export will not be diverted to uses other than those stated in the application. So the onus is on the receiving government. Here's Ken Epps, again from Project Ploughshares and he says that's just not enough.

SOUNDCLIP

There is an obligation of the part of the Canadian government, once they authorize arms transfers, to make sure that they don't get diverted into the wrong hands. And the typical arrangement is that once Canada has authorized an export, and has got what's called an import certificate from the, in this case, the Saudi government, that's kind of the end of Canadian responsibility. And in our view that's not sufficient I mean there needs to be a process of making sure that obligations are met on the part of the Saudi government for example, that there's good stockpiling of weapons, that there isn’t corruption, there aren't the routes that often are used to divert weapons into the wrong hands. So I think it is a legitimate concern that Canadians should be worried about.

AMT: Well you just told us what the government was saying Nahlah. Do they say more about the tracking?

NAHLAH AYED: We asked for an interview with either the Minister of International Trade or Foreign Affairs or Global Affairs and we were told that the schedules won't permit it. But we were told by a spokesperson that the government simply does not have information of any Canadian exports ending up in Yemen and a spokeswoman for the Department of Global Affairs told me yesterday that if we become aware of information suggesting that controlled goods from Canada may have been acquired by someone other than the authorized end user, we do work with exporters to ensure that appropriate measures are immediately taken to prevent a recurrence.

AMT: And does that satisfy the people who are monitoring this?

NAHLAH AYED: Well, Amnesty International wants to see the government go further than that. Here's James Lynch again.

SOUNDCLIP

It is very clear to us that there is a substantial risk of these kinds of transfers being misused and leading to human rights violations. We want to see a suspension in the transfer of all of those kinds of arms and munitions to Saudi Arabia, until the risk is clearly demonstrated to have subsided.

AMT: Okay, complete suspension how realistic is that?

NAHLAH AYED: Clearly it's hard to say, but likely not. You've seen that the government has been reluctant to renege on that 15 billion dollar deal with Saudi that was signed under the Tories. But then again, Ottawa has promised to acede to the small arms treaty, the global small arms treaty and there may be an opportunity there to make changes to Canada's rules that could make them tougher where exports of weapons are concerned. That could have a practical effect on what is exported to Saudi Arabia.

AMT: And in the meantime for people, the civilians in Yemen, the selling of weapons to Saudi Arabia becomes a life and death issue.

NAHLAH AYED: Yes and that is what we heard again from the ground. And here is Yemeni journalist Hussain al-Bukhaiti, who I remind you, does have links with the Houthi fighters.

SOUNDCLIP

I'm sure after seeing those sniper rifles that Canada, which should be one of the most democratic countries, which many people would like to go to Canada, and have seen the Canadian Prime Minister receiving those Syrian refugees and welcoming them unlike other countries, but on the other hand his government, directly or indirectly, are supporting the Saudi army in Yemen, are supporting the war in Syria, are keeping a blind eye on the terrorists in Syria, where they’re getting their money from, which all that supported by Saudi money, by the Saudi intelligence, and the Saudis are one of the biggest allies of the US, of Canada, France and UK in the region.

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AMT: You can hear the exasperation in his voice on that one.

NAHLAH AYED: Yes

AMT: Nahlah Ayed, thank you.

NAHLAH AYED: You're welcome.

AMT: Nahlah Ayed is the CBC's foreign correspondent based in London. You can watch her full report tonight on The National on CBC Television and CBC News Network let us know what you think of this.

Former ISIS hostage Nicolas Hénin says Western bombing only helps Islamic State

Guests: Nicolas Henin

[Music:Theme]

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current. Still to come.

SOUNDCLIP

Translation
transcribed audio content

SERGEI LAVROV: The last two years, I believe was the period of lost opportunities in our relationship with Canada.

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AMT: The Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is not alone in thinking his country's relationship with Canada could use a reset. The new Liberal government has vowed to thaw relations between the two northern Nations. We are debating just how warm and cozy things should get in half an hour. But first, a journalist who understands ISIS from the inside out.

SOUNDCLIP

BARACK OBAMA: ISIS has no ideology of any value to human beings. Their ideology is bankrupt. They may claim out of expediency that they are at war with the United States or the West, but the fact is they terrorize their neighbors and offer them nothing but an endless slavery to their empty vision and the collapse of any definition of civilized behavior. And people like this ultimately fail. They fail because the future is won by those who build and not destroy and the world is shaped by people like Jim Foley and the overwhelming majority of humanity who are appalled by those who killed him.

AMT: Well, that's President Barack Obama in August of 2014 just after the American hostage James Foley, a journalist, was killed by the jihadist group ISIS. One of the few people who was with James Foley while he was being held by the group was a fellow captive, Nicolas Henin. He's a French journalist. He was first imprisoned by ISIS in June of 2013, he was held for 10 months and he was held with James Foley as well as other captives who would be murdered on camera by their ISIS handlers. Nicolas Henin has survived to tell his story, and to share the insights he has gleaned into ISIS. He's written a book. It's called Jihad Academy: A Former ISIS Hostage and Veteran Middle East Journalist Explores Misperceptions of Islamic State and Their Consequences. Nicolas Henin joins me from Washington, DC. Hello.

NICOLAS HENIN: Hello.

AMT: You make the point that the killing of James Foley was a turning point for ISIS and the West. Why do you say that?

NICOLAS HENIN: Well, first of all I did not remember these words by Barack Obama and today listening back to them, I'm shocked. I’m shocked to the extent it did not understand anything. I mean, what we just heard him saying is nothing like a good counter-narrative. It’s just meant to say well, these people are bad and they are evil. And sorry? Yes, of course, in a war we always consider that the enemy is evil. The problem is that the enemy will always consider that we are the evil. So, if we want to counter its narrative in a way that is a bit more efficient, we have to go a bit deeper than that. We are very bad at marketing our ideals, our values, and they are good at that. Their values are, we are fighting back because the West have humiliated; the West is every day killing and humiliating Muslims and we are restoring the Muslim pride. And this is a narrative that we have to kill. Even more than to kill militants, we have to kill this narrative.

AMT: So, the killing of James Foley, that very public and brutal killing was a turning point for ISIS you say.

NICOLAS HENIN: It was a turning point not for them, but for us because we disregarded ISIS up to that point to a big extent. We thought it was like a like a marginal problem or another terror group in a very volatile region. And then, especially in the Americas, people realized that no, this problem is very real and that's a real stretch.

AMT: James Foley was your friend.

NICOLAS HENIN: Yes, he was and one of my best ones. I[indecipherable] us this ten months of captivity. We were seven months together.

AMT: What can you tell me about what he was like?

NICOLAS HENIN: James Foley has a very high profile, but there were also Americans who are hostages who have been murdered, and I would like to talk about all of them.

AMT: Okay.

NICOLAS HENIN: Because it would be unfair to just go always about him. So, James Foley, just like Stephen Sotloff, Kayla Mueller, Peter Kassig, but also the British citizens who have been murdered, David Haines and Alan Henning, well, they were all beautiful people and this is what makes ISIS’s crime even bigger. People went to Syria and had been taken hostage by this terror group were wholly in love with this region. Not one of us went there to make big money. We all went there because we had a story, we had an interest for this country; for this crISIS. We thought that we could bring something positive to this crISIS either by reporting on it or by bringing aid work.

AMT: Can you tell me about the story we're trying to cover in Syria when you were captured?

NICOLAS HENIN: That was my fifth trip to Syria since the beginning of the revolution and at this fifth trip I went to Raqqa. It is the de facto capital city of the Islamic State in Syria, and it collapsed. It folded two months, well six weeks earlier to the hands of the rebel coalition. The people of this Islamic state were part of this coalition and literally expelled all the others of their competitors. So, all the Democratic, or the regular rebels in that coalition and they became a totalitarian power of the city.

AMT: So you were in Raqqa. How did the capture happen?

NICOLAS HENIN: Have you seen a movie with a kidnapping in it? Well, it was exactly like that. So, basically a car that stops people with weapons and their face covered who jumped out and take humans, that's it. Within ten seconds I was handcuffed in the back of the car.

AMT: What can you tell us about life in captivity?

NICOLAS HENIN: That was boring. So, I don't want to bore your listeners [laughs]. It was mostly boring.

AMT: It must have been terrifying.

NICOLAS HENIN: Yes, and even painful sometimes.

AMT: You have made a point of saying that you are not going to actually write a book and spend a lot of time talking about the actual captivity. Why do you feel that way?

NICOLAS HENIN: First of all, because it's very personal. It was very personal. It has to do with my privacy and I don't want to expose my sentiments, my intimate feelings to the public. And also because for more political reasons, because it would be I'm sure, precisely what ISIS would like. You know, we had been 15 of us were hostages and had been released. No one wrote about his captivity and I've found it very positive because ISIS would have loved us, all of us, to go to the media and say, look, poor guy, I’ve been taken. Look at what they have done to me. Look at how terrible they are and how bad they are, and how nasty they are. Yes, they are bad and nasty, but I will not put a finger on that.

AMT: Can you tell us about the day you were freed?

NICOLAS HENIN: Ha. It was--when I first saw the border, that was a beautiful time. I mean, these are minutes that one cannot forget in your life. They're probably almost as important as when I witnessed the birth of my children. I had been waiting, praying for ten months for this minute.

AMT: What is the biggest misperception we have about ISIS?

NICOLAS HENIN: I would say that the biggest misperception is to say that they are evil. I'm not going to say that they are not evil, but they are not THE evil, they are only one of the symptoms of the evil. The real evil is the authoritarianism that produces massive killing and that has caused the majority of the Syrian population, and an important minority of the Iraqi population, now consider that its own government is not legitimate. So, this has left a vacuum on the large parts of the territories of these two countries and ISIS is—sometimes when you look at a news report, you have the feeling that they are the bad guys who can destroy systems that were walking beforehand. No, they are just very opportunistic. States have failed. They have left some vacuums and just jumped on this opportunity to set up a state, that's it.

AMT: You actually talk about sort of a jihadi highway that ran through Syria toward Iraq at one point—

NICOLAS HENIN: That was at the beginning of the--

AMT: Yeah but it was the beginning of the Iraqi war, right?

[crosstalk]

NICOLAS HENIN: Exactly. That was an American occupation of Iraq and this is to show the duplicity of the Syrian regime that favoured the jihadists from the very beginning. So, when [indecipherable] comes now to the world community and gives interviews to Western media saying, you need me to fight terrorism. I mean, this guy has been a sponsor of terrorists for ten years in Iraq. It was responsible for the murder of American troops in Iraq and coalition troops in Iraq during all of the occupation because virtually every single fighter who entered Iraq during the Iraqi insurgency, went through Syria and had, at some point, a connection with the Syrian intelligence.

AMT: Well, tell us a little bit more about that because you identify a Sheikh. Again we're talking, in the early 2000s.

NICOLAS HENIN: Yes, the Sheikh of Kakar was a guy, a religious leader in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, and he was actually not a double agent, but a simple agent of the intelligence and his job was to play the flypaper, to attract all the jihadists, to put them on the list so that the Syrian intelligence has a nice overview of them and to organize transit to the Iraqi border. Some of them got arrested, but not all of them. He was really the middleman for the jihadists but also with the Syrian intelligence.

AMT: And so what was the advantage for Assad and the Syrian

intelligence to do that?

NICOLAS HENIN: To weaken the American situation in the region.

AMT: So tell me a little bit more of how Assad and ISIS use each other?

NICOLAS HENIN: It's obvious. As long as Bashar al-Assad is in power, there are murderers of Syrian people in huge numbers, and ISIS needs this to exist and recruit. This is the basis of their narrative. They pretend that they exist to offer protection to the Arabs in Syria. This is the basis of the narrative. On the other hand, as long as ISIS exists, that's life insurance for Assad because it allows him to say it's me or the killers, and then Assad can come to us Westerners and tell us, well eventually you will have to support me because if I fall, then you will have these guys coming to Damascus.

AMT: There are—

NICOLAS HENIN: And even economically-- it has been disclosed in French policy last week that there is a refinery in northern Syria, in the Syrian province of Hasakah. This refinery is located inside ISIS controlled territory and in this refinery, you know who walks in it? Well, Syrian engineers coming from the regime side, working together with guess who? Russian engineers working inside ISIS territory. And there has been a middleman that has been identified. His named is George Haswani and he is a Syrian Christian but also a Russian national and he is the guy now under the list of sanctions by both the EU and the US. He's the guy who purchases oil from ISIS and sells it to the Syrian regime. He’s a middleman.

AMT: Okay, so there are rebels who want democracy. Where are they in this mix?

NICOLAS HENIN: There are no longer good armed groups in Syria. It may be a bit disappointing to say that, but virtually everybody has blood on its hands and everybody has committed crimes. But, if you look at the civilians, you have still today wonderful people who have organized life in the cities that are not under the control of the Syrian regime, and also not under the control of ISIS. These are people we should support.

AMT: Where are they?

NICOLAS HENIN: Everywhere. Everywhere where there is neither the regime or ISIS.

AMT: So what do you think Western leaders should be doing to support

those citizens?

NICOALS HENIN: We should first protect them because it's totally insane, it's immoral to say that while we are shocked by an attack like the Bataclan in Paris last November, that caused 130 dead, but meanwhile we just don't care about the 200 plus Syrian civilians who have been killed on average every single day over the last five years since this revolution started. So, we have to find ways to stop this killing because it is these massacres that are responsible for the radicalization in Syria. These people have been submitted to so many crimes, to so much destruction that eventually yes, are looking somehow for revenge. So, if we bring security, if we if we allow them to not to have to fear death every single morning when they wake up, then they will de-radicalise. It will just make—

AMT: How do you do that?

NICOLAS HENIN: We do that mostly by looking at what killed them all. Until recently, the bombings by the Syrian regime using improvised bombs was the single biggest cause of civilian deaths in Syria. Now it is the Russian bombings. Over the last month for instance, the Syrian bombings have killed ten times more than ISIS. So, we have to find a way to stop this. We have to find incentives that we can give to the Russians to tell them, well what you are doing in Syria is totally counterproductive. You are actually recruiting for ISIS.

AMT: Okay, I want to keep going on this because now you mention the Bataclan. Obviously, the multiple attacks in Paris in November, France immediately responded with more air strikes. Again, as somebody who was actually there, a victim of all of this, what was your reaction to that?

NICOLAS HENIN: I just couldn't believe that we still don't understand these guys and the situation. Basically, I don't want to be mistaken or misunderstood. I do not advocate for no air strikes at all because, yes, marginally airstrikes can be good and they can bring something. But, I lived myself being a war correspondent, for weeks if not months in cities that were hit by bombings. And therefore I can imagine very well what is the state of mind of the inhabitants of Raqqa if you look at it occupied by ISIS. But, the bad guy with a long beard, manning the checkpoint at the corner of the street will always be somehow lesser evil than the coward plane who drops bombs in the night, and preventing kids from sleeping, and destroying houses. Of course I do trust the coalition pilots to do as well as possible to avoid collateral damages, but even the most clever bomb when it goes into a city, it will cause damages. We have to think about all the side effects of these bombings and keep them marginal. The answer to terrorism can be only marginally military. It has to be mostly a question of narrative and second, we shall help our local people and give them hope. We shall address and engage the population of this country. The centre of gravity in such a war is the people. The people will decide who will win this war. If we have them, the Syrian on our side, then we will win. If we push them, for instance, by bombing them, if we alienate them, then we will just push them into the hands of ISIS. So, this is something we should be very careful with.

AMT: Well, Canada has just ended bombing missions against ISIS. What do you think that decision?

NICOLAS HENIN: That was positive. It's better to do that now than after you're hit by a terror attack. Because France started this bombing mission before the Paris attacks, so afterwards we were trapped. We could not stop them because that would mean that we acknowledge the victory of our enemy. By increasing them, what we have done, we also increased the side effect I just described.

AMT: You know that those who support much more muscular military views of the fight against ISIS, hearing you say that we must work-- that the real centre of gravity in this war is the people, and if you're going to fight terrorism you have to do it with a message and marginally military, you know that they will just reject that.

NICOLAS HENIN: Yes, but I have an advantage. I am a victim. So, I cannot be blamed for being an accomplice of them. I just know them, and I know also the environment because I've been a reporter for 15 years in the Middle East because I covered the Iraqi invasion from Baghdad, the invasion of Iraq from Baghdad. Because I covered this war, this revolution intensively, I think I can provide arguments to what I'm saying. I’m trust-able due to my position of victim of ISIS. It is not because I want to spare them that I'm advocating for this strategy, it's because I know how we can destroy them.

AMT: It’s important to hear your voice. Thank you for speaking with me today.

NICOLAS HENIN: Thank you.

AMT: That is Nicolas Henin and he prefers the anglicization of his name for an English conversation. Nicolas Henin is the author of Jihad Academy: A Former ISIS Hostage and Veteran Middle East Journalist Explores Misperceptions of Islamic State and Their Consequences. He spoke to us from Washington, DC. What do you think of what he has to say? Let us know. You can tweet us we're @thecurrent. We are at The Current, CBC. You can find us online cbc.ca/thecurrent. And if you're joining us partway through, go to our website download the podcast or stream on line cbc.ca/thecurrent.

Re-engagement with Russia a dangerous proposition, says anti-Putin activist

Guests: Bill Browder, Jeremy Kinsman

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Now I think about Madam Speaker, there should be some effort to re-establish communications with the Soviets. I for one think that the superpowers must go. They must try and find some way of stop shouting at each other when the world is teetering on the brink of disaster.

VOICE 2: President Putin's invasion of Ukraine, undertaken to serve his own domestic agenda, political agenda to divert attention from Russia's long term decline under his rule, and to interfere with the democratic aspirations of a sovereign country; these things must not be allowed to stand. Mr. Putin's recklessness threatens global stability, regional stability and has spread fear among our eastern allies.

AMT: Well what a difference a few generations can make, those clips from former Prime Minister’s Pierre Elliott Trudeau and then Stephen Harper show that when it comes to Canadian relations with Russia there are cycles of warm and cool. There is no doubt that it doesn't get much chillier than the cycle we have just been through with the Harper government. At the 2014 G20 Summit, Prime Minister Harper famously avoided Vladimir Putin completely, except for a tense handshake and a gridded message for the Russian leader, to quote, “Get out of Ukraine.” Now the Minister of Foreign Affairs Stéphane Dion wants to thaw the relationship and start talking again. Here he is in question period last month, responding to concerns that reengaging with Russia would let down

Ukraine.

SOUNDCLIP

At the worst time of the Cold War Canada was speaking to Russia. Today, United States is speaking to Russia, Europe is speaking to Russia, and Japan is speaking to Russia; would you say that all these countries are letting down Ukraine? And which one’s helping Ukraine that Canada never speak to Russia, even about the Arctic.

AMT: Well Russia's ambassador to Canada, Alexander Darchiev, appears to welcome the new tone. He spoke with CBC's Power and Politics a few weeks ago.

SOUNDCLIP

We need to restore true dialogue between Russia and Canada. We need to go back to the common sense as opposed to name calling and brinksmanship statements that we so often heard before of the October election. We were really encouraged that Canadians voted for change, for a shift to engagements in foreign policy for stronger and constructive Canadian voice on the international arena. We need and should cooperate in the areas where we have strong mutual interest despite disagreements that we have of course.

AMT: Well some degree of reengagement with Russia seems definitely on the way but there are questions about just how cordial relations should be. We're exploring that issue today, starting with a well-known critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Bill Browder is the CEO of Hermitage Capital Management. He's the author of Red Notice: A true story of High Finance Murder and One Man's Fight for Justice. He is in Canada this week to push politicians to implement the so-called Magnitsky Sanctions linked to the death in prison of his Russian lawyer. Bill Browder joins me today in our Toronto studio. Hi.

BILL BROWDER: Hi.

AMT: Now we have spoken about Sergei Magnitsky and what you've documented in your book before on The Current but remind us who he was.

BILL BROWDER: Well basically I was the largest foreign investor in Russia for a number of years; I was exposed corruption I was expelled from the country. And after I was expelled the authorities raided my offices, seized all of my documents, and Sergei Magnitsky with my lawyer who stepped in to help me figure out why my offices were being raided what was going on. He figured out of that the whole purpose was to implement a complex huge scam, a $230 million scam that the authorities were perpetrating, not against me but to steal their own taxes. He exposed this scam. He was subsequently arrested, put in jail, tortured for 358 days and killed by the authorities who he had exposed. And so I've been on a mission for justice for the last six years, and what I've seen is the Putin regime, right up to Vladimir Putin, are involved in criminal activities to cover of murder. And many other crimes like this.

AMT: And he had a number of illnesses going into prison they became worse and he was refused all treatment.

BILL BROWDER: Well what happened was he actually wasn't ill; he was a perfectly healthy 37 year-old man going into prison. He was tortured for 358 days in the most horrific way. He ended up getting very sick from the torture. He developed pancreatitis and gallstones and they refused him treatment. He desperately applied in pain on 20 different occasions for medical attention and all of those requests were either ignored or denied. On the night of his death, he went into critical condition and that night they put him in an isolation cell and then eight riot guards with rubber buttons beat him until he died.

AMT: What has the Russian government said about his death?

BILL BROWDER: The Russian government has basically said, he died of natural causes, he never exposed a fraud, and that he and I were the criminals. This is what they do.

AMT: And what he exposed, you had paid something like $230 million in Russian taxes and what he was able to do is follow a paper trail that led to people very high up in the Russian government who actually took that tax money and shifted it over.

BILL BROWDER: These corrupt officials stole their own tax money. Sergei Magnitsky who is a brilliant tax lawyer was able to trace the whole crime. He exposed the people involved. And then some of the very same people he exposed were the ones responsible for arresting him, putting him in jail, torturing him to get him to withdraw his testimony against them, and then ultimately he died.

AMT: So you’re trying to get this legislation passed which actually died on the order paper did it not in the last election? It was in train, was it not?

BILL BROWDER: Right. So we came up with something that's called the Magnitsky Act. The Magnitsky Act is very simple we said, if the guys can't be punished in Russia, we shouldn't allow torturers and murderers to come to the west. I should point out that the Magnitsky Act has already been passed in the United States; it was passed with a 92 to 4 vote in the Senate, 89 per cent of the House of Representatives. I came to Canada with the same piece of legislation, and Irwin Cotler who is a very famous member of the Canadian Parliament was the champion of this. He was a member of the Liberal Party. He proposed this and it was actually approved unanimously in the previous parliament and the previous government pledged to put it into place and then time ran out. So now here we are. Then we had an election and during the election, my sympathizers who consist of many people from the East European community, put it to each political party, would you support a Magnitsky Act? And each political party said, yes. It's kind of a no brainer. So I mean the simple question is should we or should we not allow Russian torturers and murderers to come to Canada?

AMT: And you can name them?

BILL BROWDER: We can name them.

AMT: And they’re named in your book, but how does Vladimir Putin figure in this? How do you connect the dot to Vladimir Putin?

BILL BROWDER: Vladimir Putin is the guy who is personally involved in the conspiracy to obstruct justice. In other words he’s personally involved in covering up the murder of Sergei Magnitsky; he's exonerated the people involved. He's been on the record publicly at press conferences changing the story. He's involved.

AMT: What did you think of Vladimir Putin when he first came to power?

BILL BROWDER: I should point out that the before he was in power there was Boris Yeltsin. And Boris Yeltsin was drunk. He was a sort of erratic character. The whole country had been given away to the oligarchs. And so when Vladimir Putin came to power in the year 2000, I along with a lot of other people saw this sort of healthy looking, reasonable young, sober, what we thought was sort of a faceless technocrat taking over. That was the impression that I got when he first came in. So I cheered, I thought oh great here we have some sort of technocratic, westernised, market oriented President. And I should point out that for the first couple of years Putin actually was sort of technocratic and market oriented.

AMT: And that’s when your business was thriving was it not?

BILL BROWDER: My business was doing well when the government wasn't involved in massive criminal activities. It was basically around 2004, Putin turned over to the dark side. It was at that moment in time when he convicted Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was the richest man in Russia who was the owner of the Yukos Oil Company, he put him in jail. Not because he had committed any crimes, he put him in jail because he was a political enemy. He took his oil company and from that moment on it became sort of open season on any oligarch who didn't throw his wealth and throw his weight in with Putin.

AMT: Now you know you're a real Putin critic. You know there are people listening who are not Putin critics. You point to oligarchs, they’re oligarchs for a reason, they were handed a whole bunch of Russian wealth. There are people who would argue that there's a power play going on here that Vladimir Putin is not an evil incarnate, that there was real mismanagement. And that your view is one view.

BILL BROWDER: I actually agree with those people. I think that that the oligarchs were terrible people. The problem with all this, we all wanted the oligarch capitalism to end and for a normal country to sort of evolve. But instead of what happened, before you had 22 oligarchs own 40 per cent of the country, and one had hoped that would stop. But instead you have effectively one oligarch who owns the whole country which is Vladimir Putin. So it hasn't gotten better it's just gotten dramatically worse.

AMT: So in light of this and your view of things and your very specific experience with Sergei Magnitsky, what do you think of Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion suggesting that Canada reengage with Russia.

BILL BROWDER: Well it all depends on what reengage means it's a very open ended word. If it means having conversations with Russia, I think that all countries should have conversations with one another because without communicating you can end up in all sorts of trouble. If it means appeasing Russia, if it means not doing things that might upset Russia; that's a huge mistake.

AMT: And there's the rub, we have to figure out where that line is.

BILL BROWDER: Yup.

AMT: Okay well Bill Browder. Let's bring someone else with a different perspective into this, Jeremy Kinsman was Canada's ambassador to the Russian Federation from 1992 to 1996, he is now a resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California Berkeley. He's visiting faculty at Ryerson University's department history as well. Jeremy Kinsman was also a member of Justin Trudeau’s Foreign Policy Council before the last election. He joins us now. Hello, Jeremy Kinsman.

JEREMY KINSMAN: Hi, Anna Maria. Hello, Bill.

BILL BROWDER: Hello.

AMT: Do you believe that Canada should reengage with Russia?

JEREMY KINSMAN: Absolutely of course, but two things, I applaud Bill Browder’s loyalty to Sergei Magnitsky and his perseverance in trying to get justice. And justice at this stage can only be obtained by getting some kind of penalty on the people who perpetrated the crimes that he mentioned. That absolutely is true and I also agree that we have to talk with everybody and diplomacy is done best with your adversaries and people with whom you have differences and isn't at all an issue of appeasing, it's an issue of engaging. And that is absolutely first and foremost in Canadian foreign policy.

AMT: How should Canada view Vladimir Putin given the kind of corruption that Bill Browder and others have outlined?

JEREMY KINSMAN: There are a lot of different stories about Vladimir Putin; he had $240 billion salted away in Zurich or something. You know, Vladimir Putin is the president of Russia. I don't like a lot of things he does, I particularly deplore what's going on just right now about NGOs, about human rights defenders in Russia who are being accused of being foreign agents. I think it's awful. But the fact, Putin has a point of view and Russians have a point of view and Putin is enormously popular in Russia because he is appealing to some stuff in Russians, in Russian psychology that gets to them. They’ve got grievances, I don't think we have to soothe those grievances, but I don’t think we go after Putin for a whole bunch of behavioural things which we can't prove.

AMT: Well what do we do with him then, you talk about some engagement not appeasement. What do we talk to him about? What should the relationship be?

JEREMY KINSMAN: We talk to Putin about the central issues in the world in which we have a stake, the world has a stake, and Russia has a decisive influence. Of course it starts with Ukraine. There's no outcome to the Ukrainian crisis without Russian say so, that's a fact. Syria. They right now are holding some pretty important cards on the outcome in Syria and getting a cease fire there. Ending this refugee hemorrhage and trying to somehow hold the Middle East together, which increasingly is looking like a failed region and it goes on, they’re absolutely essential to getting Iran and to honour, to deliver on that nuclear agreement, and then there’s the Arctic. I mean Russia and Canada occupy most of the northern part of the world. So of course we got to talk to them about those things. You know, when you communicate about human rights, you communicate best to countries with whom you have a relationship with. If you don't have a relationship, if you're not talking, you're not communicating to them, you're just talking into the air to yourselves. So I think it's essential we communicate; you can do two things at the same time. We've done it historically with the Chinese. We did it with the Soviet Union for many years, listen to that quote from Trudeau. We can do two things at the same time. And the fact is that the outrages that are going on, take the Magnitsky thing, or take what is going on in Russia today with NGOs, they do put a ceiling on how close we’re going to be with Russia. And that is something we communicate to the Russians.

AMT: Bill Browder, what do you think of that?

BILL BROWDER: Well I think that basically Putin looks at any type of engagement as weakness. So you cannot talk to Putin and say, hey, Vladimir, can you please just not do that nasty stuff in Ukraine. Hey, Vladimir, can you stop killing civilians in Syria because that's not the way he operates. The way he operates is he goes and does the stuff and he sees how much can he get away with before somebody says enough is enough and we're going to stop. And just to give you an example, he flew his planes into Turkey. The Turkish president, who is more like Vladimir Putin than anyone else, shot down his plane and so you know what, he's not going to be sending in more planes into Turkey. Putin needs to understand with hard real barriers what he's up against. In order to deal with Putin, the West needs to effectively set up a very, very firm military circle around all the things we have an interest in. We can talk to him while we're doing that but the thing that he has to see is there’ll be consequences, real serious consequences to actions that are adverse to the West's interests.

AMT: And Jeremy Kinsman.

JEREMY KINSMAN: No I don't think so. I mean Dmitri Medvedev was talking in Munich last week about a new Cold War; we’re going into a new Cold War. We're not going to set a military circle around Russia. I mean that's what set him off in 20047 for heaven's sake. It was eastward expansion of NATO. And it was the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. That's what got the guy going when more than anything else. There's no talk here of appeasement, okay? Look, the Turkish thing, the shooting down of a Russian plane was probably the stupidest thing anyone could've done. And so I'm not celebrating that as being some kind of statesman like act of resistance to Putin. The Syrian thing is enormously complex and what Russia is doing, at least, has been to enable the stanching of the expansion of ISIL in Syria. We've got to get together with Russia and Syria, somehow, and not against Russia.

BILL BROWDER: That's outrageous. Russia has been bombing civilians. Russia has created more civilian casualties in Syria than any other group since the moment it started bombing. At this point it's been documented by Amnesty International that Russia has committed gross war crimes in Syria; they haven't been fighting ISIL, they've been fighting rebels and they've been fighting civilians and creating a whole new wave of refugees.

JEREMY KINSMAN: You know Bill, there are two points of view. I talk to people all the time about the body counts and so forth. I'm not extolling what Russia is doing, what I'm saying is that the enemy right there is ISIL. And we have to work with those people who can combat ISIL on the ground, who have to be Muslims from the area. And it has to include the Syrians. And we have to get a deal with Russia. That's why Kerry is talking to Lavrov three times a week.

BILL BROWDER: And he’s getting nowhere.

AMT: I'm going to just interrupt on this, you didn't hear this Jeremy Kinsman because you're in California, but we just had an interview with some with a former ISIS captive, ten months, who says that ISIS and Assad need each other and the West needs to look at that as well. But let's go back to what do you think we lost in the last several years of not talking to Russia, Jeremy Kinsman?

JEREMY KINSMAN: Well we simply don't exist as far as having any influence on Russia's concern. You know, I don't think that Sergey Lavrov, whom I've known for 30 years, I disagree with him on some things but he's an objectively interest driven person, is interested in talking to other people about mutual interests and about talking these things out. We're not talking them out, we have no influence. We used to have a lot of influence in Russia, outsized influence. And as a matter of fact about Putin, I met Putin in St. Petersburg in the 1990’s when a couple of idealistic small investors in St. Petersburg were getting squeezed by the mafia because they were actually beginning to make some cash and they were scared as hell. And I got put on to seeing him by the mayor of St. Petersburg and I told him that, look we're not going to be any longer investors in your country if this stuff can go on, and you got to understand that, you've got to fix it. And he did fix it. The guy is not in permeable to reason.

BILL BROWDER: Well I was the largest foreign investor in Russia and my business was raided by officials from the Russian government who didn't even steal my assets, they stole their own money, nearly a quarter of a billion dollars. Vladimir Putin became well aware of that through the work of Sergei Magnitsky. And instead of punishing the people who stole the money, he ended up punishing the punishing Sergei Magnitsky by killing him and then putting him on trial after they killed him. Vladimir Putin is no friend of investors, he's no friend of the West, and he’s a criminal by any objective standards.

AMT: Okay. And let's just get some clarification; Magnitsky was killed in a prison. Vladimir Putin was not the person; you're making allegations here, obviously. These are allegations, they are not proven. These are allegations. I have to say that, we have legal issues to make but these are your allegations and Sergei Magnitsky absolutely died in Russian custody in prison.

BILL BROWDER: And the president's Human Rights Council confirmed that he had been beaten and effectively murdered.

AMT: Jeremy Kinsman, let me ask you, is the approach you advocate with Russia the same as you would see for any country or are the stakes higher with Russia in your view?

JEREMY KINSMAN: Well I think we have to differentiate among countries. Anna Maria. Of course, Russia is in effect our neighbour. We are co-habitants of the Arctic and Russia is an extremely important country and we historically have a relationship going back. But by and large, yeah, it's the same. We deal with a whole bunch of countries that are massive chronic human rights defenders; we have a controversy in Canada overselling light armored vehicles to one of the greatest human rights offenders in the world, that’s Saudi Arabia. We have a relationship with Nigeria which just passed a law, reinstituting the death penalty for gays. I mean the list goes on and on, we have to talk to people. These countries, I'm totally, totally convinced that Russia has to be reformed. But that reform is only going to come from Russians. Our job is to support human rights defenders in Russia and to talk to the Russians candidly about the extent to which our values do place constraints on how close we can be. But that doesn't obviate the need that we've got to connect to them, we've got to engage with them on some vital shared interests. And name calling, saber rattling, and all of this stuff doesn't get us anywhere.

AMT: Bill Browder there have been sanctions against Russia?

BILL BROWDER: Yep.

AMT: How's that working?

BILL BROWDER: It's the bringing Putin to his knees right now. The sanctions that are really, really causing him trouble are the sectorial sanctions. These were banking things that were put in place after the Russians shot down MH17. And basically what those sanctions do is it prevents any westerner from lending money to the most important Russian borrowers and they have about $600 billion of borrowing and hard currency. And they have about 350 billion of money at the central bank of which not all that is real money in the first place. And so if those sanctions don't get lifted, which is what one of Putin's biggest problems, they're going to run out of money in about 18 months. And so one of my theories about what Syria is all about is Putin is effectively bombed his way to the negotiating table in Syria. And in an effort to create affectively, as George Soros put it, weaponize refugees so that the problem of refugees is overwhelming the problem of Ukraine and those sanctions get lifted.

AMT: Jeremy Kinsman, how do you see those sanctions?

JEREMY KINSMAN: Well the sanctions are there Anna Maria because of Ukraine and they're tied very specifically to an outcome for Ukraine of the kind that's kind of laid out in what's called the Minsk to agreements, which is still obeyance. I just read this morning of the fighting going on again in Eastern Ukraine. And they're going to stay there until the situation is resolved. And they are not connected to anything else. Maybe Putin would dearly like them to be connected to something else but they're not. They exist for the specific thing to do with the Ukrainian affair which basically fell out of the way the Soviet Union very suddenly and more or less peacefully ended in 1991 as sort of unfinished business. We got to finish that business and get a settlement there. As to Syria, it's an extremely complex thing, but let me just point out to the fact that Russia has a couple of motivations on Syria. One of them is because Russia has suffered more from Islamic terrorists than any country I can think of. Just think of the atrocities going back, Beslan, that theater, the airplanes that went down, and the Moscow Metro, so they’ve got motivation. Two, what they don't want, Putin is obsessed and I think he’s wrongly obsessed, but he's obsessed with the propensity of the United States to try to change leadership in other people's countries. And so he is trying to make sure that doesn't happen to Assad. I hated Assad. But he's got a point of view.

AMT: Okay. So we're almost out of time, Jeremy Kinsman, what would be your ideal vision of how Canada's relationship with Russia should work?

JEREMY KINSMAN: Well it's just an objective relationship that on issues where we have joint interests, that we manage them together within the limits that are placed on our friendship by the behavior of Russia, both toward its own citizens and toward foreign investors. Obviously that places a ceiling on how high this relationship can go.

AMT: Okay. And Bill Browder, briefly, can the Canadian parliament pass the Magnitsky Act that you would like them to and have dialogue with Russia? Can they do both?

BILL BROWDER: So America passed the Magnitsky Act, and as was pointed out earlier in this conversation, John Kerry has three conversations a week with Sergei Lavrov. You can have a mature relationship where you call them out and you punish them for bad things and at the same time you talk to them about areas where you have a mutual strategic interest.

AMT: We have to leave it there, gentlemen thank you both.

BILL BROWDER: Thank you.

AMT: Bill Browder, anti-Putin activist, CEO of Hermitage Capital Management and the author of Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance Murder and One Man's Fight for Justice. He's in our Toronto studio. Jeremy Kinsman was the Canadian ambassador to the Russian Federation from 1992 to 1996, he joined us from California. We did ask to hear from the Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion and the Russian ambassador, Alexander Darchiev, neither was available for today.

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Feb. 22, 2016 episode transcript

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